


Sacred New Beginnings

by universallongings



Series: Give You My Sunshine (Give You My Best) [3]
Category: The Rookie (TV 2018)
Genre: Babies, Christmas Fluff, Domestic Fluff, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff, Hospitals, Pregnancy, SO MUCH FLUFF, Short & Sweet, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:55:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26086816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/universallongings/pseuds/universallongings
Summary: Lucy’s toes match the color of the sunflowers she carries on her wedding day.Tim watches her walk barefoot down the beach with eyes that are traitorously wet. (He doesn’t want to waste any time blinking back tears. He doesn’t want to lose sight of her for even a millisecond.)ORFive times Tim notices Lucy’s yellow nail polish.
Relationships: Tim Bradford/Lucy Chen
Series: Give You My Sunshine (Give You My Best) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1874110
Comments: 14
Kudos: 131





	Sacred New Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

> This little collection of feelings is part of the [Give You My Sunshine (Give You My Best)](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1874110) universe, and it also works well with [“Everything I Need and More”](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25261909) if you’re looking for things to read before it for extra feels. However, this can certainly stand on its own too. 
> 
> The title for this fic comes from “Cornelia Street” by Taylor Swift.
> 
> Comments and kudos are always appreciated! 

Lucy likes yellow nail polish on her toes.

The first time Tim notices is in the hospital. 

It’s the middle of the night, and he knows he should be trying to sleep. But instead, he’s thinking about how they really should make hospital chairs more comfortable because his back is already killing him. And that’s just a reminder that he’s not as young as he used to be. 

It stands in sharp contrast to how young she looks laying there, finally getting some peaceful sleep. She looks like a kid.

(She _is_ a kid, some weary part of his heart answers back.)

That’s when he notices the foot poking out from under the blankets, the nails painted a soft shade of yellow.

He thinks about how Isabel usually favored blacks and dark blues when she painted her nails.

(His keyed-up mind files that difference away because it feels important. It feels like it matters.)

Slowly, he eases the blanket back over those sunshine-yellow toes. (Because being cold certainly wouldn’t help her feel comfortable.) And if his hand traces a gentle path up and down her calf for a second, he can blame it on the delirious state of his 3 a.m. brain and not the fact that he _needs_ to touch her—just for a second, just to make sure she’s really there. 

And if his heart clenches almost painfully in his chest at the way she smiles in her sleep, he can blame it on the aftershocks of an adrenaline-filled day and not the fact that he knows deep in his gut that this feels a little too much like love.

It feels like a new beginning. 

\-----------------------------

Lucy’s toes are painted yellow the night he kisses her for the first time. 

He notices them against the floor of his kitchen as she loads his dishwasher, blissfully unaware of his presence. 

She looks comfortable. She looks beautiful. 

She looks bright. 

She’s glowing in the soft light of his kitchen, and what had felt like just a house for so long suddenly feels like a home again. It feels ready for happy memories to imprint themselves into its walls.

(His heart feels a little bit like that too.)

So when she reaches up on those sunshine-yellow toes—reaching for him, choosing him—he closes his mouth over hers and lets some of that light into the corners of his heart that have been dark for too long. 

She smells like lavender. She sounds like happiness. 

She tastes like a new beginning. 

\-------------------------------------------

Lucy painted her nails yellow for Christmas. 

He knows this because those sunshine-yellow toes are rocking back and forth between his as they sway in the light of a tree that now has more of her ornaments on it than his. 

He’d never really cared much about Christmas before. (Santa didn’t always stop at his house, anyway.) But that was before Lucy.

(So many things were different before Lucy.)

Now it’s Christmas Eve and she’s in his arms wearing a silky red nightgown with white trim, and he’s never liked Christmas this much before. 

Maybe it’s because they’re both a little drunk on red wine and Irish coffee. And maybe it’s because they’ve apparently decided that “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” is a slow song—his hands sliding down her body to press her closer to him. And maybe it’s because Kojo is sleeping nearby with his antlers still on his head. 

It’s their first Christmas together, and it looks merry and bright and all the other cliched things he never really understood before. 

It looks like a new beginning.

\-------------------------------

Lucy’s toes match the color of the sunflowers she carries on her wedding day.

Tim watches her walk barefoot down the beach with eyes that are traitorously wet. (He doesn’t want to waste any time blinking back tears. He doesn’t want to lose sight of her for even a millisecond.) 

Her hair is down and her dress is simple and her feet are bare. She looks like Lucy—comfortable and confident and brighter than the sun that’s setting behind them. 

And when she reaches him, he has to remind himself that there are rules to follow and he can’t kiss the smile beaming up at him until he’s told. 

(He’s never hated rules more.) 

But when it’s over—when their vows are said and they’re both done crying and a new, lighter ring encircles his finger—he finally kisses that smile until those sunshine-yellow toes are lifted off the ground and she’s laughing against his lips. 

It sounds like a new beginning.

\-------------------------------------------

Lucy wants her toes painted yellow when the baby comes. 

The problem is she can’t quite reach them anymore. (Or so she tells him through tears when he finds her in the bathroom a week before their daughter is supposed to make her way into the world.)

That’s how Tim finds himself sitting on the couch with her feet in his lap, holding the ridiculously tiny brush like it’s more dangerous than any weapon he’s ever held in his life.

While he’s trying his best not to smudge, she’s taking another look through the baby names book, trying once again to balance her desire for a name that feels meaningful and unique with his disdain for anything that sounds like a perfume and not a person. 

Just as he’s finishing up the last toe, she kicks her feet excitedly and he has to remind himself not to huff out loud in annoyance at his nearly perfect paint job being ruined. 

“Nora!” she says with so much certainty that he feels it deep in his bones. 

That’s it. That’s their daughter.

“Nora.” His echo is sure, steady. 

“It means honor,” she tells him as he stands up to read over her shoulder. “A little bit of her dad to always carry with her.” 

When he kisses the top of her head, he closes his eyes against the tidal wave of emotions threatening to take him under. 

(Sometimes he’s still blown away by how much he loves her—how much love his own battered heart can still hold.)

But when he opens them again, he notices something else written next to that name in the book.

“It seems like it also means light,” he points out, his eyes trailing from her sunshine-yellow toes to the brightness of her smile. “So she can carry a little bit of her mom with her too.” 

A few days later, those sunshine-yellow toes are poking out from under a hospital blanket once again. But this time, he gets to kiss Lucy’s closed eyelids and whisper reminders into her skin of how strong she is—of how much he loves her. 

And as she sleeps, he settles in for another round of counting the tiny, unpainted, perfect toes that belong to Nora Claire Bradford. He holds his daughter close and breathes in the newborn scent everyone told him about but he’d never fully appreciated until he was holding his own baby girl. 

It smells like hope. It smells like sunshine. 

It smells like a new beginning.


End file.
